Conversations about bagels have something
to teach us about the nature of
genres and the study of material culture. I
realized this a few years ago as I was sitting
in an Einstein’s Bagels in Las Vegas that was
decorated with standardized murals imitating
1930s Bauhaus design. I remembered a
conversation with a friend a decade earlier
about the authenticity of modern-day bagels—
or lack thereof. But as I glanced at
the “traditional” preparation with lox and
capers alongside the sun-dried tomato variants,
it occurred to me that it might be a false
competition. Both “official” bagel forms
and their variants—bagel types and bagel
versions, as folklorists would have it—were
part of the same process of representing
and creating a tradition.

What do I mean by this? Many debates
about authenticity boil down to the exclusion
and inclusion of objects related to a
category: poppyseed is genuine, blueberry
is not. I would like to suggest that these discussions
suffer from a basic category error.
Attempting to understand an object through
classification—as an example of the genre
“bagel,” in this case—is both necessary
and misleading. What makes something a
bagel? One might ask the same question
of lasagnas, Panama hats, duck decoys,
folk songs, novels, longhouses, bebop, or
romantic comedies. Charlotte Smith, breaking
a few rules, introduced her 1784 Elegiac
Sonnets with the preface, “The little poems
which are here called Sonnets have, I believe,
no very just claim to that title” (1993,
3). Although her violations of the sonnet
genre wouldn’t even be noticed by a modern
reader, her anxiety over the production of a
“true” sonnet is telling. Part of understanding
a genre, especially a genre one has strong
feelings about, involves thinking about it as a
taxonomic class or collection of observable
traits. “Real” and “fake” versions of a genre
always come into play. In order to describe a
genre, one must provide examples that fall
within that genre—and also those objects
that lie outside it. But, I would like to argue,
the feelings are ultimately as important as
the traits. “Genre” is a subject that represents
cultural discussions about objects, not
objects in themselves. A bagel is not a “real”
bagel because of any of its physical features.

Before you become upset, it is worth
noting that folklorists have a rich vocabulary
for describing these kinds of cultural
discussions. Richard Handler and Jocelyn
Linnekin pointed out a long time ago that
tradition may or may not refer to the past,
but the creation of tradition is a constant
part of cultural practice:

The origin of cultural practices is
largely irrelevant to the experience of
tradition; authenticity is always defined
in the present. . . . The prevailing concept
of tradition, both in common
sense and social theory, has envisioned
an isolable body or core of unchanging
traits handed down from the past.
Tradition is likened to a natural object,
occupying space, enduring in time.
(1984, 286)

In other words, an “authentic tradition” is
something quite different than historical
fact, but nevertheless insists on being historical
fact. Even if the tradition is objectively a
recent development, it insists that it is not.
Practitioners of a particular tradition may or
may not be aware of this paradox; Handler
and Linnekin found that they often were.
Whether they were or were not aware of
this possibility, however, tradition demands
an insistence on “unchanging traits handed
down from the past.” Those supposedly
unchanging features then require a set of
rules in order to maintain them, and rules
are what genre is all about—whether in music,
religious practice, or bagels. Maintaining
these rules means guarding the true form
of a genre from fake, modern, nostalgic
reenactments like the murals at Einstein’s.

Nevertheless, this problem lands us in
some murky territory, since nostalgia is
everywhere—including in the works of
scholars and historians. One might think
that murals at Einstein’s Bagels are the
enactment of nostalgia, whereas tracing
the history of disputes between union and
nonunion bakeries in 1940s Brooklyn might
presumably be a form of scholarship. Clarifying
the role nostalgia plays in scholarship
is complex, however, since nostalgia often
fuels folklore collection work. A parody of
this phenomenon, Calvin Trillin’s investigation
of bagels’ history in his essay “The
Magic Bagel” was motivated by his desire
to discover the lost bagels of the past and
his contempt for California bagels. His
daughter is a “real” New Yorker because

she knew the difference between those
bagel-shaped objects available in American
supermarkets and the authentic New
York item that had been hand-rolled
and boiled in a vat and then carefully
baked by a member in good standing of
the Bakery and Confectionery Workers
International Union. (2000, 51)

Unlike some scholars, Trillin is straightforward
about his own motivations. He is
attempting to manipulate his daughter into
moving back to New York by bribing her
with the bagels of her childhood. California,
of course, represents a form of inauthentic
novelty contrasted with the authenticity of
New York. Trillin attempts to figure out the
story of the lost bagel of his youth:

There was a sharp split between bagel
bakeries and bread bakeries. The bagel
bakers had their own local, No. 338.
They didn’t bake bread, and bread
bakers didn’t make bagels. Originally,
of course, bagels were made only with
white flour. But some bread bakers who
trafficked in pumpernickel would twist
some bread dough into bagel shapes
and bake them. By not going through
the intermediate boiling that is part of
the process of making an authentic
bagel, they stayed out of another local’s
jurisdiction. (2000, 53)

He discovers that the lost bagel of his
childhood was not, technically speaking, a
bagel at all, since it was from one of those
pumpernickel bread bakers that made them
in order to evade union rules. To his chagrin,
his own ethnic sensibility clashed with the
official definition of the genre—in this case,
a definition that was both legal and formal.

There is an entire academic language
for these kinds of formal distinctions. The
“etic” or outsider genre terms folklorists
use are “type and version.” The general–to–specific hierarchy runs genre, subgenre,
type, variant or subtype, then version. Einstein’s
poppyseed and blueberry bagels are
both versions: single “performances” of a
type of bagel might fall under the subcategory
“Gentile bagel” or “Jewish bagel,”
but they belong to the genre “bagel.” The
bagel might actually be a subgenre under a
larger umbrella that takes in the bagel and
doughnut. Bread things with holes in middle
are the basic structure; sugary or not sugary
could be subgeneric again, while blueberry
versus poppyseed is a more idiosyncratic
variation at the level of type or variant.

Consumers of bagels, however, have their
own “emic,” or insider genre rules. Most
insist that “real” bagels have a distinct form.
Eben Sorkin told me that “a real bagel is
boiled, has a certain texture, and also a differentiation
in texture between the crust and
the center. Fake bagels are homogeneous
in texture. The fake ones bother me for
cultural and culinary reasons, and also out
of compassion—no one should have to
eat one” (2010). Sean Murray claims that “incorporating too many non-bread foods (such as seeds or dried herbs) in a single bagel,
or even a single non-bread food such as
blueberries, raisins, or cheese, is verboten”
(2010).

Trillin’s quest, while not an academic
venture, highlights the complicated interchange
between research and nostalgia and
between etic and emic genres. While many
Jews assume that “authentic” bagels may
be traced back to Eastern European shtetls,
Trillin discovers—or at least believes—that
this is an invented tradition, since bagels
seem to descend from rather arbitrary union
disputes of the fairly recent past. However,
Trillin’s point was not that the bagels of his
youth were “fake,” even if they technically
weren’t bagels. Rather, he concludes that
“real” bagels are whatever New York Jews
say are real bagels.

Further attempts to examine the genre of
the bagel reveal something quite different
than the specifics of its material form. It
is precisely the existence of “fake” bagels
that produces such strong feelings about
the “real” ones. Alice Lichtenstein’s attitude
is typical: “I remember the first time
I encountered a fake bagel—Thomas’s or
Lender’s?—in Iowa. I couldn’t believe the
goyim actually thought they were eating a
bagel! White bread shaped as a doughnut”
(2010). That is, an important feature of bagels
is their Jewishness. Part of the outrage
has to do with the object itself, but some
of the annoyance comes from the fact that
Iowans had appropriated and altered an
object that belonged to New York Jews.

But what are those objects? Einstein’s
Bagels is, needless to say, judged by everyone to be a theme-park model of the
Jewish culture of the past, an inauthentic
corporate caricature. Pumpernickel bagels,
on the other hand, are almost always placed
in the “authentic” category, despite Trillin’s
demonstration that they originated as illicit
non-bagel novelties.

Bagels are a genre in distress, but it is
primarily the distressed nature of a traditional
genre that establishes something as
a genre in the first place. In other words,
the concern for bagels’ “traditional” form
only became important when cultural assimilation
became objectionable rather than
desired. The corporate revival of the “traditional”
bagel is achieved by an appropriation
of ethnic nostalgia, but once this nostalgia
is appropriated, it is deemed to be “inauthentic”
and must be distinguished from
“genuine” ethnic identity. In other words,
ethnic identity is partially created by mourning,
reviving, reinventing, or reimagining a
tradition—and then by decrying the results
once they have been appropriated by mass
culture. This, in turn, leads to a quest for the
“true” lost tradition of the past. Benjamin
Balthaser, a Californian, writes:

My first or second time in the Jewish
promised land, Brooklyn, I ate the best
bagel I’ve ever eaten on the last day of
my visit. The shop was owned and run
by what seemed like a small army of
Hassidic men in homburgs and shirt
sleeves, and on a hunch, I bought two
dozen and tore through half the first
bag before I’d even made it to Connecticut.
I can remember exactly what
made them so delicious—there was the
soft, almost moist, consistency of the
boiled dough, the poppy seeds baked
into the skin, the way they seemed to
almost have a burnt shell around them
and this soft, earthy inside—like some
kind of shtetl stink, some earthbound
memory of pogroms and bald women
and cabbage. The memory is perfectly
clear: the aftertaste of the dough, the
sick compulsive full feeling of six
bagels on a Peter Pan bus on the 91.
Every time I go back to Brooklyn, I
wander around looking for this mythic
bagel shop. I’ve walked every street of
Crown Heights; I’ve made the rounds
in Park Slope; I’ve cased Fort Green
and still can’t find this shop anywhere.
I’m starting to think I may have imagined
it, that it was some fantasy born
out of my West Coast anxiety around
and desire for authenticity, to taste it,
to be able to swallow the meaning of
Jewishness and feel it expand in my
stomach and then get sick with it and
want to puke. (2010)

As Balthaser’s description makes clear, the
desire for a mythic object of the past—and
hence, perhaps, a resolution to one’s own
identity conflicts—is often rather vexed.
This desire is centered on the belief that the
important feature of the sought–after object
is not only its physical characteristics, but its
origin—in Brooklyn.

Several hours north, however, Montreal
Jews strongly disagree. Canadian Jews claim
that Montreal bagels are the only “real”
bagels and insist that New York variants
are entirely inauthentic. Montreal bagels are
smaller and sweeter than New York bagels
and baked in a special wood-burning bagel
oven. Traditionally, they come only in poppy
and sesame varieties, known as “black” and
“white” bagels. Montreal is dominated by
two bagel bakeries—Fairmount and Saint
Viateur—each claiming that its recipe was
brought over by the Eastern European
founders.

Montrealers’ disdain for the New York
bagel is absolutely universal. April Ford
says that Montreal bagels are “small and
dainty, the size that bagels should be. Those
big puffy bagels are just like eating bread”
(2010). Catherine Cuttler, a Canadian expatriate,
says:

I only eat Montreal bagels and shun
all others. I will never eat a Zeppy or
an Iggy bagel, even if it is a sesame
or poppy variety. The idea of a whole
wheat bagel makes me shudder. When I
see my grandchildren eating a chocolate
chip bagel, I wonder what will become
of them. I know that there are bagels
other than sesame and poppy that
exist in Montreal now, but they, too,
are not real bagels. Am I being too
nationalistic or too inflexible? I don’t
think so. (2010)

Although baking methods are important,
the element that makes something a “real”
bagel is that it is produced in New York or
Montreal, presumably by Eastern European
Jewish immigrants. As it turns out, local
identity tends to trump both formal and
ethnic characteristics.

In other words, arguments about bagels
are what bagel genres are all about. “Authentic”
bagels may or may not actually refer to
the past or conform to the genre; the thing
that makes them traditional is that they are
objects of discussion by and importance
to people who eat them. One might notice
also that the distinction between emic and
etic genres is blurred: the necessity that a
bagel be boiled in order to be a bagel is an
“academic” as well as a legal distinction.
However, the insistence upon this academic
distinction is the ethnic characteristic from
which the entire argument emanates. Union
rules and academic distinctions are important
not because they distinguish between
true and false bagels, but because the discussion
of those rules is part of ethnic identity.
In other words, it is the nostalgia for a lost
piece of the past that creates the “rules” for
the genre. If bagels are not under attack by
an egregious inauthenticity, they lose their
identity as a distinct genre with an ethnic
or national identity and must be consigned
to the genre of “bread things with holes in
the middle.” This opposition, of course,
only exists insomuch as it is part of the self-conscious
ethnic identity of the practitioner.

Interestingly, category rules are also part
of the generation of the physical object:
Union rules and academic distinctions
create the rhetoric that defines true and
false bagels, but they also work like a
recipe. People follow the recipe; create the
traditional item, with or without worrying
about whether it is legitimate; and experience,
consume, and remember the item as
being real or fake, with or without considering
it to be part of their cultural identity.
After all, people eat bagels. Gentiles and
Jews eat bagels, and by eating bagels, they
are also not eating bread. And they may
know this or not know this, and may or
may not care.

Of course, the recipe may or may not be
followed; the generic distinction only rears
its ugly head when rules are perceived to
have been broken. This nostalgia is often
accompanied by its own form of self-consciousness—
the recognition that the
desire for the past is unattainable—and
quite self-aware of its own falsehood.

The belief in the “real” object is often accompanied
by a sense of its loss. One may
understand that one’s own tradition is not
the same as historical fact, and at the same
time be chagrined to no longer follow it.
Catherine Cuttler’s son, Joshua Hasenberg,
sheepishly admits:

I was bothered by fake bagels for a long
time (although I always loved cinnamon
raisin). I now allow my children to order
chocolate chip bagels and put whitefish
salad on them. Also, I’m more than willing
to eat something traife on a bagel.
Like a whole lobster. (2010)

And Nicole Hasenberg, Joshua’s spouse,
confesses, “It is a complete outrage to Josh
and me that we purchase chocolate chip.
Recently, Noah’s had mango bagels, which
our son of course wanted me to purchase”
(2010). My own two decade–old conversation with Tracey Levy about blueberry
bagels is a good example of this form of
chagrined self-awareness. This entire article
could perhaps be seen a form of nostalgia,
self-parody, and identity caricature.
Although I am a “real” scholar, I am also
simply another Jew arguing about bagels.

Many connoisseurs of bagels are quite
aware of these paradoxes. For example,
they insist on the tradition’s connection
to their own identity, even while admitting
that gentiles can produce a more authentic
bagel. Saint Viateur bagels in Montreal is
currently owned by Italian Robert Morena,
and one primarily encounters Catholic Francophones
working in Saint Viateur shops.
The acknowledgment that bagels need not
be made by Jews to be authentic is often
a troublesome one. Benjamin Balthaser
remarks:

My mom always says the best bagel-shop
bagel ever made in San Luis
Obispo was by a Vietnamese baker,
but she also does always mention that
it came from “that Vietnamese” bagel
maker. That is, while she acknowledges
that one doesn’t need to be a Jew to
make a good bagel, it’s never quite a
natural experience for her, either. (2010)

This kind of observation is shared by many.
Cecilia Walsh-Russo writes:

Absolute Bagels is owned and operated
by a Thai immigrant worker and his
extended family. He worked and apprenticed
at Esso Bagels in midtown
before opening up his shop on Broadway
and 108th Street. So “authenticity”
in terms of who’s doing the baking
was definitely something I pondered
whenever I’d hear my order for a bagel
with cream cheese translated into Thai
for the family of workers behind the
counter.

Nevertheless, Walsh-Russo maintains
that Absolute bagels are, in fact, absolute.
Moreover, eating an even more authentic
Absolute mini-bagel brings her back to a
more authentic, more “ethnic” time.

Bagel size was also something I noticed
at Absolute, because the regular bagels
are HUGE—fleshy and overwhelming
in terms of their girth. But Absolute
sold what was termed “mini-bagels” as
an alternative. Mini-bagels are actually,
it turns out, the size of bagels from
the nineteenth century—the original
(as in possibly truly “authentic”) bagel
size now characterized for twenty-first
century portion mongers as “mini.” In
case you’re wondering, I was a huge fan
of the mini because it was always like
biting into something as it “truly” was,
back in time. Plus the “mini” helped
me not feel like a complete glutton for
eating whitefish AND a bagel. (2010)

I grew up by the Bagel Oasis in Queens;
they still exist, but they are not the same
as they used to be. I’m a New Yorker,
but I really only like Montreal bagels
now. They’re different from New York
bagels, since the important part of the
recipe is the wood-burning oven—
they’re more like cousins. Montreal
bagels are strong. Montreal bagels have
a sweetness—they have a different texture,
different flavor. But I don’t care
where the bagel is from; if there was
an Iowa City bagel that was good, I’d
eat it. (2010)

Nostalgic insider conversations about
true and false traditions tend to become
self-conscious. The arcane “truth” about
“real” and “fake” bagels becomes a kind
of joke precisely because it has become an
academic—that is, a meaningless—distinction.
One might become chagrined to realize
that one’s own quest for authentic bagels is
a fraud, but still insist on it anyway.

Of course, even if one were to revive the
authentic bagel of the past, it would not
recreate the past. Moreover, the recreation
of the past isn’t really the point: that is why
people are willing to eliminate ideologically
inconvenient or formal distinctions while
still holding their ground. The real goal of
the genre argument is to employ nostalgia
for the past in order to influence the present.
Tracey Levy explains:

I get that bagels became a mainstream
food, as well as an ethnic food. For
those of us for whom bagels were a
cultural food, I felt like we had to stand
up for real bagels. It registers that my
sister eats blueberry. Anyone I know
who is Jewish who eats a fake bagel—it
registers. I have a reaction. They are not
only being assimilated, they are being
assimilated with a really unappealing
product! That really bothers me. (2004)

Traditional genre rules are perhaps best seen
as a kind of enforcement. This enforcement
is not so much about objects themselves,
but rather an enforcement of ethnicity,
place, nation. As Richard Bauman notes,
“Prescriptive insistence on strict generic
regimentation works conservatively in the
service of established authority and order”
(2004, 8). And yet, the “academic” distinction—
the etic genre—is in some sense important,
too, not because it is “correct,” but
because the argument between tradition and
novelty is an integral part of ethnic identity.

As I sat in that Einstein’s Bagels—incidentally,
only a few miles away from the
New York–New York Hotel and Casino,
where butcher shops and manhole covers
were recreated as a Las Vegas Strip tourist
attraction—I stared at a square Asiago
cheese bagel and realized that it was perfectly
recognizable as a bagel, despite conforming to no formal rules of the genre.
But, as Jacques Derrida might say, genre is
an inescapable form of legal enforcement
that is always violated. If there were no rule
breakers, there would be no rules to insist
upon. Witness Tracey Levy’s response to
her sister Sara Vogelhut’s confession that
she liked blueberry bagels: “And you call
yourself a Jew?”

Jonathan Sadow is an assistant professor
in the Department of English at the State
University of New York–Oneonta. He
received his doctorate in comparative literature
from the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. His recent article, “The
Epistemology of Genre,” appeared in the
2008 volume Theory and Practice in the
Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy
and Literature (London: Pickering
and Chatto), edited by Alexander Dick
and Christina Lupton.

Bagels are a genre in distress, but it is
primarily the distressed nature of a traditional
genre that establishes something as
a genre in the first place. In other words,
the concern for bagels’ “traditional” form
only became important when cultural assimilation
became objectionable rather than
desired.

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